How Long Does Someone Actually Look at an Email?
You've heard the claim so often it's almost a cliché:
"You only have a few seconds to grab someone's attention."
But how long does someone actually spend looking at an email? The research gives us a more precise answer — and a more useful one.
Based on billions of email opens, Litmus has measured how long recipients engage with messages, and the headline number may surprise you. The average email gets around 9 seconds. But the average only tells part of the story. What really matters — and what separates effective email from forgettable email — is that not every message gets the same amount of attention.
Some emails are glanced at for barely a second. Some are skimmed. A smaller share actually earn several seconds of focused attention.
That distribution is the key insight for any marketer. Your email doesn't need to be read from top to bottom to work. It needs to communicate its most important information before the reader moves on.
The Average Email Gets About 9 Seconds
The most recent figure in the Litmus research is around 9 seconds — the average time recipients spent with an email in data collected between August 2021 and August 2022.
It's worth being precise about what that number is and isn't. It's not a stopwatch measuring how long every person consciously reads every word. "Read time" here reflects how long an email remained actively engaged with, according to Litmus's measurement methodology.
More importantly, the average hides a huge amount of variation. Some emails receive substantially more attention; others disappear almost immediately.
The 9 Seconds Aren't Evenly Distributed
Dig into the 2022 data and you find email engagement splits into three broad groups:
| Engagement | Approx. share of emails |
|---|---|
| Less than 2 seconds | 30% |
| 2–8 seconds | 41% |
| More than 8 seconds | 29% |
Read that differently and it's striking: almost one-third of emails get less than two seconds of attention, and another 41% get between two and eight seconds.
So for a large proportion of your sends, the question isn't:
"Can I make someone read my 500-word email?"
It's:
"What can someone understand in the first few seconds?"
That's a very different design problem — and a much more tractable one.
Email Reading Time Has Shifted Over the Years
The historical data is genuinely interesting, because it doesn't follow a tidy narrative of "attention spans always shrinking."
Litmus measured average email read time as follows:
| Year | Average read time |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 10.4 sec |
| 2016 | 11.1 sec |
| 2018 | 13.4 sec |
| 2022 | ~9.0 sec |
Read time actually increased between 2011 and 2018 — in 2018, Litmus reported an increase of 21% from the 2016 figure of 11.1 seconds up to 13.4 seconds, an analysis covering more than 10 billion email opens. Only later did the average come back down.
The lesson isn't that a single "average reading time" is a reliable number to plan around. It's that attention fluctuates — and that the more useful pattern is captured in that distribution of glances, skims and real reads above.
What Can Someone Actually Do in 9 Seconds?
Nine seconds sounds impossibly short. But think about what a person can recognise almost instantly.
0–2 seconds — they can identify:
- who sent the email
- what the email is about
- whether it looks relevant
- whether it appears promotional
- whether anything immediately catches their attention
2–5 seconds — they can:
- scan the headline
- grasp the main proposition
- recognise an image or product
- locate the primary call to action
5–9 seconds — they may:
- read supporting copy
- evaluate the offer
- scan additional information
- decide whether to click
- decide whether to keep reading
The important point is that email reading isn't necessarily linear. People don't always start at the first sentence and work their way to the last paragraph. They scan, they jump, they weigh the message against what they were doing a moment ago.
The First Few Seconds Matter More Than the Last Few
Imagine an email that's 500 words long, with your most important message halfway down:
Save 25% on your next order.
The call to action sits at the bottom. The first 250 words cover the company's latest announcement, background and product features. Structurally, it's a perfectly good email — except that a recipient who spends three seconds scanning and decides it isn't relevant will never reach the offer.
The solution isn't necessarily to make every email extremely short. It's to front-load the information that matters. Put the value where the scan begins.
The "Can I Understand This?" Test
Here's a simple check. Imagine someone gives your email five seconds, then ask whether they can answer four questions:
Who is this from?
What is this about?
Why should I care?
What should I do next?
If those answers aren't obvious, you've buried the value too deep. That's especially true on mobile, where the reader is scanning a narrow screen while moving through a crowded inbox.
Shorter Doesn't Automatically Mean Better
The "9 seconds" statistic is easy to misread.
You shouldn't conclude "every email should be nine seconds long" — the data doesn't say that. Consider the range of messages you actually send:
- A transactional email may need only a few lines.
- A product announcement might need more explanation.
- A newsletter can carry several stories.
- A B2B nurture email may require more context.
- A highly engaged subscriber may willingly spend much longer.
The goal isn't to force every email into a specific length. It's to make sure the important information survives the scan.
The Difference Between a Glance, a Skim and a Read
Earlier Litmus research framed the same idea with a useful vocabulary.
Glanced — less than 2 seconds. The recipient barely looks at the message. Branding, subject-to-content consistency and visual hierarchy matter enormously here.
Skimmed — 2 to 8 seconds. The recipient is looking through the email but not reading every word. Headlines, subheadings, bullet points and CTA placement become important.
Read — more than 8 seconds. The recipient is spending enough time to consume substantially more of the content. This is where longer copy can work.
Litmus found engagement shifted across these categories over time, with a greater share of emails receiving longer attention in its earlier datasets. The vocabulary is still useful today: design for the glance, satisfy the skim, reward the read.
Your Subject Line Isn't the Only Attention Test
Email marketers spend enormous effort optimising subject lines — understandably, since the subject line decides whether anyone opens the email at all. But there's another test immediately afterward:
What happens when they get inside?
Think of the reader's journey as a chain:
- Inbox — do they notice the sender?
- Subject line — does it earn an open?
- Open — you're inside.
- First few seconds — does the layout make sense at a glance?
- Main message — is the value clear?
- Call to action — can they act on it?
- Click — the goal.
A great subject line can win the open and still lose the click. That's why open rate alone never tells you whether an email truly held someone's attention. For more on that gap between opens and clicks, see why email campaigns get opens but no clicks.
What Should You Put Above the Fold?
If a large share of readers will scan rather than carefully read, the top of your email becomes extremely valuable. Use it to communicate three things:
1. The main idea
What is this email actually about?
2. The value
Why should the recipient care?
3. The action
What can they do next?
You don't need the CTA at the very top of every email. But the reader should be able to understand the email's purpose almost immediately.
Images Help — But They Aren't the Message
Visual hierarchy helps people understand an email quickly. Images set context, headlines set hierarchy, and buttons set the expected action.
Just don't put your entire message inside an image. Images can fail to load, recipients may have them disabled, and screen readers need real text. Your core proposition should be understandable without graphics — which is also why some emails are read faster than you'd expect when design and text work together.
Mobile Makes the Problem More Interesting
Email attention doesn't happen in a controlled environment. Someone could be standing on a train, walking between meetings, sitting in a queue, or clearing notifications during a break.
The device matters too — but not in the way you'd guess. Historical Litmus research found that mobile recipients actually showed increasing read engagement between 2011 and 2016, rather than abandoning emails faster. So the simplistic idea that "mobile readers don't read emails" doesn't hold up.
The better conclusion:
Make the email easy to scan regardless of device.
About Long Emails
Long emails aren't automatically bad. A highly engaged subscriber can spend far longer than the average reading your message. The problem arises when an email is long without being structured.
Compare two ways of presenting the same information:
Long but structured
- New product — short explanation
- What's changed — three bullet points
- Why it matters — short paragraph
- See the changes — clear call to action
Easy to scan.
Long and unstructured
Three large paragraphs, another paragraph, a huge image, another four paragraphs, and a call to action hidden at the bottom.
Same information, completely different experience.
The Real Metric Isn't "Time"
Knowing that the average email gets around nine seconds is useful context. But your real question should be:
"What happens during those seconds?"
Does the reader see the message, understand the offer, find the call to action, become interested, and click? That's where your campaign metrics come in. A long read time with no clicks isn't necessarily a success; a short read time followed by a valuable conversion might be. For a full breakdown of these metrics, see the email metrics that actually matter.
How to Measure Whether Your Email Holds Attention
Don't look at read time in isolation. Look at it alongside open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, conversion rate, unsubscribe rate and revenue per recipient.
For example:
| Metric | Campaign A | Campaign B |
|---|---|---|
| Open rate | 40% | 30% |
| Click rate | 1% | 3% |
| Conversion rate | 0.1% | 1% |
Campaign A looks better if you're only watching opens. But Campaign B is potentially far more valuable. This is why email reporting has to look at the whole journey, not a single number — and why click-through rate and click-to-open rate deserve as much attention as opens.
So How Long Should Your Email Be?
There isn't a magic number. The better question is:
How much information does the reader need to take the desired action?
If you can communicate the value in 50 words, don't use 300. If your audience needs 500 words to understand a complicated proposition, don't arbitrarily cut it to 100 — instead, make those 500 words easy to scan.
Use short paragraphs, descriptive headings, bullet points, generous whitespace, clear calls to action and a strong visual hierarchy. Think scannable, not necessarily short.
The 9-Second Challenge
Here's a practical test to run on your next campaign.
Open the email yourself, give yourself nine seconds, then stop and ask:
What did I actually understand?
Could you explain what the email was about, what the benefit was, who it was for, and what you were supposed to do? If not, the hierarchy needs work.
And if you're going to be brutally realistic, run the two-second version too — because around 30% of emails in the latest cited Litmus research were viewed for less than two seconds. Make sure your most important information is visible even at that speed.
The Bigger Lesson for Email Marketers
The idea that people "read" an email from top to bottom is increasingly unhelpful. People scan. They glance. They pause. They click — or they ignore. They may even interact with an email in a way your tracking system doesn't fully capture.
So stop designing for an imaginary reader who sits down and carefully reads every sentence. Design for the person who opens your email while already thinking about something else. You've got only a few seconds to convince them your message deserves more attention.
Make those seconds count.
Measure What Happens After the Open
Read time is only one part of the story. To understand whether your emails are converting attention into action, look at open rate, click rate, click-to-open rate and conversion performance together.
Calculate Your Email Performance →
Email Calculator lets you analyse the numbers behind your campaigns and see where engagement is being gained — or lost.
Related Articles
- The 30 Seconds That Decide Whether Your Email Gets Read
- Why Your Click Rate Might Be Falling in 2026
- How Email Tracking Actually Works
- The Email Metrics That Actually Matter
- Why Click Rate Is More Important Than Open Rate
Sources
- Litmus, Email Attention Spans Increasing — analysis of billions of email opens, including historical engagement-time data.
- Litmus, Email Read Time Increased by 21 Percent — analysis of more than 10 billion email opens and the 13.4-second 2018 average.
- MarketingProfs, How Much Time Do People Typically Spend Looking at an Email? — summary of Litmus' 2022 data, including the 9-second average and engagement distribution.
Frequently Asked Questions
The most recent widely cited Litmus research found that recipients spent an average of around 9 seconds looking at an email in 2022. Earlier Litmus research measured 13.4 seconds in 2018, showing that email read time can change considerably over time and by audience.
There is no universal number, but research shows that a significant proportion of email messages receive only a few seconds of attention. In Litmus research covering 2021-2022 data, 30% of emails were viewed for less than two seconds and another 41% for between two and eight seconds.
Some do, but not every email receives the same level of attention. Litmus research has shown that emails can be glanced at, skimmed or read for longer periods. The key is to make the main message and desired action understandable even when someone is scanning rather than reading every word.
There is no universal ideal word count. The right length depends on the purpose of the email, audience and complexity of the offer. The more important principle is that the key value proposition and call to action should be easy to find without requiring the recipient to read the entire message.
The available Litmus data suggests that email read time has fluctuated rather than moving in one direction forever. Average read time increased from 10.4 seconds in 2011 to 13.4 seconds in 2018, then declined to around 9 seconds in 2022. These figures come from different periods and should not be treated as a live 2026 benchmark.
Start with relevance rather than simply adding more content. Use a clear subject line, make the main value obvious early, structure copy for scanning, use descriptive headings, keep the primary CTA easy to find, and remove content that does not help the reader understand or act on the message.
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